The daytime in games without villages

Moderator

We need to think of better ways to deal with daytime in multifaction games. The lynch exists in normal mafia games to give the village a chance to kill. However, in multifaction games, each faction already has this and the lynch is entirely irrelevant.

Options:

Unicycle. Can work, but is boring.

Daenym had the idea to have positive lynches; ie: the winner of the lynch gets a weapon, and uses that weapon to kill that night.

Super Moderator

Positive lynches can and should be experimented with. Winner gets a BPV or an inspection or whatever. Or the role PM of the most voted for person is publicized.

Alternatively, a more political idea I had is where either the host or a role injects a proposal every Night, and this proposal is voted on during the day. Kind of like a Rick James Bitch rule change, except less broken and brain dead.

Super Moderator

I don't necessarily agree that the lynch is boring in a multifaction game. For example, it is an opportunity to make alliances with other factions to lynch off common enemies, to negotiate, and it is a way to keep the game in relative balance should one faction start to pull ahead. For example, look at We Don't Need No Mafia...the lynches in that game were not boring at all, yet it was one of the first multifaction games.

I agree that there is a lot of room to maneuver and experiment with the lynch, but I don't see why the lynch system as it stands now has anything terribly wrong with it.

I pretty much agree with Sam's points. There's plenty that can go on in a multifaction lynch, because you have even more conflicting interests.

My idea Aska mentioned was just a way to add an extra dimension to the standard killing lynch. I'd been thinking about it for a game (obviously not the one running now), since it requires some extra strategy if the winner's nightkill is going to be successful.

FF5's multi-target lynch was another way to work around villageless lynching, though it would be a bit awkward without the HP system in place. And I'm not really the biggest fan of HP systems.

And then the opposite of Mekkah's first point, of course, is to retain negative lynches, but with non-killing effects. Hooks, kidnaps, silences, whatever. Some unfairness because it would be unblockable by SG, maybe, but the same goes for lynches (and could, like lynches, be mediated by limited-use Day actions).

People could also have the option to cast different types of votes during lynches. "Positive effect X on <user>" or "Negative effect X on <user>" or something along those lines. Then the game design just has to decide how to deal with required number of votes per person to have an effect, how many votes an individual is able to cast, etc.

One thing I thought of last night was to have one person earn in some way the ability to nominate two people two people to be voted on (think Big Brother with the Head of Household) and have people vote between those two. Earning the nomination power could be through an item (everyone would have to be able to try to steal it though) or through some sort of challenge (haven't quite figured out how to do this though). There could also be Veto powers and powers to add a third person to the lynch and stuff. Food for thought I guess.

Is this thread about fixing a problem? I see it more as a claim that days are irrelevant in multifaction and that there should be some other use for them. While I actually agree with this, I can see this thread's topic as "your creative concepts during 'daytime'" rather than finding a fix. If multifaction truly doesn't need day periods, all these suggestions are simply unique concepts one could add to their game as they choose. In fact, you could possible add an "afternoon" or "twilight" time period if you want more than one!

What I'm saying is that the current state of multifaction is not mafia. In fact, each one of them is a unique game. Using concepts from mafia like "daytime" just doesn't work these days, as, really, most of it in multifaction is simply a "non-primary part of the game", or at some cases "a waste of time".

If this thread is talking about preserving and fixing "daytime" just for the mafia tradition's sake, by all means I support it. But if we really want to preserve the tradition, we can't stray so much that normal mafia concepts no longer work. I'm sure we can evolve mafia in a way that the end result will still look like mafia! So far, we're not doing very well with that, and maybe that's the reason so many former mafia players no longer play.

It's clear that I went well off topic. It is also clear that most of you won't read this. But I'm basically saying that we would want to "fix" and "improve" the game's concepts in a way that will still resemble mafia, or else we're talking about an entirely different game.

Moderator

@US
As it is, the only interesting dynamics to multifaction lynches are "do we keep member X of our faction hidden or do we have him vote, revealing to everyone what he is" and "should we vote with faction Y or faction Z". While that may work for some games, it certainly doesn't work for all games, and there should be some decent alternatives.

@BT
This thread is meant to open some discussion about possible alternatives to lynches in multifaction games in which they are unnecessary. Sorry if the OP was ambiguous.

My post is made with big games in mind, not small, so the presence of aliases is a given in any situations I describe.

Lynches barely matter in multifaction negotiation. It's true. Until you've reached lategame (at which point it's less a matter of collecting information and more about acting on the information you have) if your faction is losing a man to a lynch, your ally is just going to tell you to suck it up. No team would want to put their guys on the line in this manner unless absolutely necessary. Most of the multifaction alliance forming and negotiation revolves around the night roles, the communication, the sharing of information. It has NOTHING whatsoever to do with lynches. So that isn't even an argument for keeping lynches around in multifaction.

Positive voting seems like an interesting concept, mainly because EVERY team would likely have a vested interest in the result of the vote, which isn't the case when it comes to lynching to kill, since there is only really one team that has any real incentive to fight back, and fighting back on your own is probably not going to yield any results against an alliance of enemies going after you. This would certainly go some way towards solving the problem that you usually see of people not bothering to post on the anonymous main forums at all.

If you going with the policy change variant that Mekkah suggested, you might actually see dynamic alliances, since different teams might react to different changes differently, adding ANOTHER layer to the the politics already involved in big games. Just saying, this might not be a positive thing in everyone's eyes.

If you go with the weapon etc idea, then you would just see more aggressive voting than you do atm, since every team would want said weapon in the hands of their own alliance of factions, rather than the enemy's. Either way it would spice things up, and probably have a visible impact on gameplay I think.

you know this already but i really want to play that political game, mekkah! shame it's not very easy to test

positive lynches are my favourite proposal so far, would like to see that concept tested, but i have to wonder how much that is really going to change; after all, people are going to want the best things for their faction or alliance, the same way people want the worst things for their enemies. not sure if a daytime is needed in some games at all